Our Game

And listened. And sniffed. And caught a waft of warm body on the still air. Sweat? Deodorant? Men's hair oil? If I couldn't define it, I could recognise it. I eased my way down the passage towards my study. Halfway along, I caught it again: the same deodorant, the faintest whiff of stale cigarette smoke. Not smoked on the premises—that would be insanity Smoked in a pub or car perhaps—not necessarily by the person whose clothes had borne the stale fumes—but alien cigarette smoke all the same.

I had laid no clever traps before I set out for London this morning, no hairs in locks, no bits of cotton thread stretched across the hinges, had taken no Polaroid pictures. I hadn't needed to. I had my dust. Monday is Mrs. Benbow's day off. Her friend Mrs. Cooke will come only when Mrs. Benbow comes, which is her way of disapproving of Emma. Between Friday night and Tuesday morning, therefore, nobody dusts the house unless I do. And usually I do. I enjoy a little housework, and on Mondays I like to polish my collection of eighteenth-century barometers and one or two oddments that receive less than their fair share of Mrs. Benbow's rather strict ministrations: my Chinese Chippendale footstools and the campaign table in my dressing room.

This morning, though, I had risen early, and with the tradecraft that seemed to have been laid on me since childhood, I had let the dust lie where it was. With a log fire in the Great Hall and another in the drawing room, I get a fine crop by Monday morning but an even better one by Monday night. And I saw as soon as I entered my study that there was no dust on my walnut desk. On its entire surface not one speck of honest dust. The brass handles pristine. I could smell the polish.

So they came, I thought without emotion. It's a given: they came. Merriman summons me to London, and while I am safely under his eye he sends his ferrets in a furniture van, or an electricity van, or whatever vans they use these days, to break into my house and search it, knowing that Monday is a good day. Knowing that Lanxon and the Toiler girls work five hundred yards away from the main house, inside a brick-walled garden cut off from everything except the sky. And while he is about it, Merriman slaps a mail check on me for good measure and by now, no doubt, a telephone check as well.

I went upstairs. Smoke again. Mrs. Benbow does not smoke. Her husband doesn't. I don't, and I detest the habit and the smell. If I have returned from somewhere and have woke in my clothing, I require a complete change, a bath, and a hairwash. When Larry has been visiting, I have to fling open all the doors and windows that the weather permits. But the landing I again smelled stale cigarette smoke. In my dressing room and bedroom, more stale smoke. I crossed the gallery to Emma's side of the house: her side, my side, and the gallery a sword between us. Larry's sword.

Key in hand, I stood before her door, as I had done last mew again uncertain whether I should enter. It was oak and studded, a front door that had somehow made it up the stairs. I turned the key and stepped inside. Then quickly closed and locked the door behind me, against whom I didn't know. I hadn't trespassed here since the day I tidied up after her departure. I breathed in slowly, mouth and nose together. A whiff of scented talc mingled with the musk of disuse. So they sent in a woman, I thought. A powdered woman. Or two. Or six. But women certainly: some asinine piece of Office decorum insists on it. Married men cannot be allowed to rootle among young women's clothing. I stood in her bedroom. To my left, the bathroom. Ahead, her studio. On her bedside table, no dust. I lifted her pillow. Beneath it lay the exquisite silk nightdress from the White House in Bond Street that I had put into her Christmas stocking but never seen her wear. On the day she left me, I had found it still wrapped in its tissue paper, pushed to the back of a drawer. In my role of Operational Man I had unfolded it, shaken it out, and placed it under her pillow for cover. Miss Emma has gone up north to listen to her music being played, Mrs. Benbow. . . . Miss Emma will be back in a few days, Mrs. Benbow. . Miss Emma's mother is desperately ill, Mrs. Benbow. . Miss Emma is still in bloody limbo, Mrs. Benbow... .

I pulled open her wardrobe. All the clothes I had ever bought for her hung neatly from their gibbets, exactly as I had found them on the day of her disappearance: long silk jersey dresses, tailored suits, a sable cape she resolutely refused even to try on, shoes by someone grand, belts and handbags by someone grander. Staring at them, I wondered who I had been when I bought them, and what woman I had thought I was dressing.